Three markets, no audience baseline, and four hours to fill the room
Who CAIS is
CAIS is an association of Canada's best independent boarding schools.
Their international fair series brings school representatives directly to families across Asia and Latin America, a compact, high-stakes format where a two-to-four-hour window is the entire conversion opportunity.
comtogether was brought in to build and run paid media for three consecutive fairs: Taipei (Aug–Sep 2025), Hong Kong (Sep–Oct 2025), and Mexico City (Dec 2025–Jan 2026). None of these markets had prior digital audiences or registration history.
Fill the room from zero
CAIS needed parents, specifically, parents actively considering Canadian boarding schools to register for and attend short-window events in three cities with no existing brand presence. The events were the product: a thin room meant the schools' time was wasted. No warm list, no benchmark, three entirely different markets running in sequence.
One goal. Three different strategies.
The brief was a single goal across three markets. The diagnosis was that each market required a fundamentally different strategy and localized ad copies, not regional variations on one playbook.
First market. Dcard added after first-week data confirmed it as a viable student channel. Audience built from zero.
Traditional Chinese creative. Meta weighted as the primary conversion driver after the first-week rebalance.
Spanish creative. Lowest cost per registration of the series, applying both prior markets' learnings.
Three campaigns. Three playbooks.
Three parallel campaigns across Meta, Google Search, Google Display, and Google Demand Gen. Dcard added in Taiwan only, after first-week data confirmed it as a viable student channel.
Full creative localization per market. Traditional Chinese assets for Hong Kong and Taiwan. Spanish assets for Mexico. Video, static banners, and ad copy produced for each.
Landing pages and email campaigns translated and adapted per market.
Audience architecture built from scratch in each city. Parent targeting primary. Secondary testing on students under 17 in Taiwan and Mexico.
Budget rebalanced after week one in each market. Meta received the majority share once confirmed as the primary conversion driver.
Each market outperformed the last. Every registration came from zero.
Cost per registration fell by two-thirds from the first market to the third. Each city's learnings were applied directly to the campaign that followed.
What this case proves
The CAIS fair series is the clearest demonstration of what structured orchestration looks like when there is no audience inheritance. No existing data, no warm list in any of the three markets.
Every registration came from paid campaigns built and optimised in real time. The cost-per-registration improvement across three consecutive markets was the result of treating each city as both an execution and a learning, and applying what the previous market proved to the one that followed.
“Timely communication, creative thinking and responsiveness to any and all requests and suggestions. The event was an ENORMOUS success. The attendees were all mission-appropriate, age-appropriate, and came with thoughtful questions and interests.”
